If the Prime Minister truly wants to confront the threat from Islamists in
Africa, he must find the money to increase the defence budget

When David Cameron was elected two years ago, he was expected to draw a veil over the Tony Blair era of military adventure. His decision to cut defence spending by the same amount as he was increasing the aid budget offered a clear sign of his priorities: more schools, fewer bombs. Just before the Libya campaign, he was touring the Gulf with businessmen, scorning the Blair era and presenting his new, trade-first foreign policy. “I am not,” he declared, “a naive neo-con who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet.”

A very different David Cameron stands before us now. He has not been in office for three years, yet is on his third war. He inherited the Afghanistan operation, but chose the Libyan one, deploying British Tomahawk missiles that cruised at about 400 feet before hitting targets in Tripoli (and, yes, clearing the way for a democracy). The speed and nature of his response to Mali, to which he has committed 330 troops so far, has established a new precedent. British foreign policy is being recast, week by week.

However, rather than being dragged into battle by a swashbuckling American president, Mr Cameron is leading the charge. In his inauguration speech last week, Barack Obama assured America that “a decade of war is now ending”. Just three hours earlier, the Prime Minister had told the Commons that a “generational struggle” against the jihadis was only just beginning. British and US foreign policy has indeed become detached – but not in the way most people expected.

Even those close to Cameron are taken back by the conviction with which he explains the Mali intervention – but it is not the first time we have seen this side to him. When Col Gaddafi seemed to be moving on Benghazi, it was Cameron who was advocating a no-fly zone, at a time when even the Pentagon was mocking the idea. He persisted, his plan was adopted, and within weeks he was standing in Liberty Square in Benghazi being cheered by the crowds. Just as the Sierra Leone intervention in 2000 encouraged Tony Blair, so Libya seems to have emboldened Cameron.

His ambition in Mali is not just to lend a few aircraft to the French, but to go after the jihadis and “close down the ungoverned space in which they thrive”. Given that the ungoverned space to which he refers is the size of France, this is no small undertaking – yet he appears to mean it. “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War,” Ronald Reagan once declared. “We win, they lose.” Cameron has the same strategy for African jihadism and puts it just as succinctly: “We must beat them militarily.” Not something the Nigerian or Algerian forces have been able to do so far, but the Prime Minister has just flown to Algiers to offer his help.

To the outsider, it can seem baffling: why would a leader so unmoved by Blair’s wars become so keen on his own? Experience of government will be one factor, but another is that a striking number of No 10 aides – including Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn – used to work in Bosnia. In the days before the Libya intervention, one of the arguments for imposing a no-fly zone was that Britain could not stand back and watch “another Srebrenica” – a reference to the 1995 Bosnian massacre that could have been stopped, had any Western power acted in time. This still gnaws the conscience of those who were in the last Conservative government. The subject is seldom mentioned, but the ghost of Bosnia haunts the Tories.

No direct threat to Britain is stirring in the Sahel. Now that drones have decapitated al-Qaeda in the Pakistani badlands, other franchises have popped up elsewhere, but they are of varying capability. The most potent is Al-Qaeda in Yemen, which has lost its founder, Anwar al-Awlaki, to a drone strike. Its greatest surviving asset is an innovative bomb-maker named Ibrahim al-Asiri, who is believed to be behind the printer bomb found in East Midlands Airport and the “underpants bomb” that malfunctioned on a flight to Detroit three years ago. The CIA believes his latest product is exploding breast implants, which would be undetected by conventional airport screening.

But the Islamists in the Sahara desert are a different breed, who are not thought to have any such capabilities or ambitions. Their beef is mainly with the Algerian and Malian governments, and they started off as drug smugglers and kidnappers. This worked for many years, mainly because the French government was unwise enough to pay for hostages.

The insurgent behind last month’s Algerian hostage outrage, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, pledged his loyalty to al-Qaeda in 2006, only to split from them later. His group, “Those Who Sign In Blood”, would doubtless be ready to strike at British expats from Mali to Morocco. But there are no signs that they have any links with (or interest in) British terror cells.

This is why Cameron could easily have dismissed the Mali campaign as a French problem, trouble from tribesmen in an old colony. But he has instead declared a principle: that Britain must confront Islamic terrorism and not allow it any sanctuary. That being so, there will be many other areas where Britain can be drawn in.

The Arab Spring has led to a great diffusion of Islamist groups – and the French have shown just how badly Europeans do without American help. Within a week, France had gone begging for equipment; it needs drones but only has two, while America has hundreds. In volunteering Britain as France’s partner, Cameron risks making British involvement a hostage to French shortcomings.

Cameron was not so keen on the military when deciding things at the last budget round. “We’ve had enough pain,” he said at one stage in the negotiations. “How about some fudge?”

Look closely and plenty of fudge was tossed around: there are heroic assumptions that the Territorial Army, which struggles to find 15,000 part-time soldiers, will somehow magic up an additional 15,000 and find employers who are relaxed about paying staff for six-month absences. There is the small matter of those aircraft carriers without aircraft, and the question of how you can maintain the quality of elite special forces while shrinking the pool of regular soldiers from which they are drawn.

There is not much time to address these problems. The next spending review comes in June and George Osborne, a former George W Bush cheerleader, has grown suspicious of foreign wars – regarding them as expensive exercises that don’t win any votes. But the military chiefs (who are also nervous about intervening in Mali without much American help) only accepted the spending cuts on the understanding that budgets would rise significantly after 2015.

Having lambasted Blair for fighting two wars on a peacetime budget, Cameron cannot very well fight three wars on an even lower budget. Even in opposition, he knew he would face a choice as Prime Minister: to shrink from the world stage, or operate the sort of military that is capable of sorting out problems from the Hindu Kush to the Sahara desert. To the surprise of many, perhaps even himself, David Cameron has taken the latter option. Now, he needs to pay for it.